The 1933 edition might be considered the first modern Giro d'Italia. It had an individual time trial for the first time as well as the first climber's competition. The organizers scheduled 17 stages, yielding an average stage distance of 197 kilometers. This is not far from the current Giri that have 20 -21 stages. The Giro also included for the first time a publicity caravan.

Alfredo Binda dominated the 1933 Giro, winning for a record fifth time.

This excerpt is from "The Story of the Giro d'Italia", Volume 1. If you enjoy it we hope you will consider purchasing the book, either print or electronic. The Amazon link here will make either purchase easy.

Rematch. This was an excellent peloton with Italy’s finest matched up against some of northern Europe’s best. The Italian portion of the 97-man pack included Camusso, Piemontesi, Bertoni, Giuseppe Olmo, Guerra, Giacobbe, Marchisio, Pesenti, Girardengo and Binda. From across the Alps came Demuysère, Gaston Rebry, Vicente Trueba, René Vietto and Stöpel. Guerra was considered the odds-on favorite as he’d won Milan–San Remo by out-sprinting his four other fellow breakaways while Binda, the reigning world champion, finished sixth, two minutes behind.

Half the riders were members of sponsored teams and half were independents. Among the independents was a rider who would gain real fame, but not by racing his bike. Faliero Masi was a competent enough rider, but in the 1950s and 1960s the bike frames that carried his name would become synonymous with beauty and perfection. In addition Masi would become a legendary team director and mechanic.

The changes to the Giro made the 1933 edition much more like a modern Grand Tour. First of all it had seventeen stages, closing in on the current standard of about twenty-one. The overall length of 3,148 kilometers yielded a 185-kilometer average stage length, again, not far from the 2009 average of 164 kilometers.

A new competition was added, a prize for the best climber. In English we generally call such a category “King of the Mountains” or KOM. In Italian it is Gran Premio della Montagna, or GPM. Four peaks were chosen for the GPM: Castelnuovo Val di Cecina, Castelnuovo della Daunia, Osteria della Crocetta and the Passo del Tonale. In July of this same year the Tour de France also added its first climbers’ prize.

Gaston Bénac was the sports editor of the French evening paper Paris-Soir, whichwas locked in a furious circulation competition with Desgrange’s L’Auto. To stimulate sales Bénac decided to promote a new race which he called the Grand Prix des Nations. Instead of a normal massed-start road race, it was an individual time trial. At first the professional racers were dubious about the idea. Some complained that it was nothing more than a test of brute force, requiring no brains, no tactics. But over time the event was accepted until it became the unofficial world championship of time trialing. Sadly, the final edition of the GP des Nations was held in 2004, a victim of changing times and tastes.

Bénac held his first race in September of 1932. Today we would consider the 142 kilometers that took almost four hours to complete an exercise in sadism. Time trials are now much shorter. Maurice Archambaud won in 1932 with Guerra the best-placed Italian, at fourth. Binda and Di Paco abandoned. Can’t hardly blame them.

Immediately appreciating Bénac’s success, the Giro management wasted no time in inserting an individual time trial into their race. Stage thirteen of the 1933 Giro was a 60-kilometer time trial from Bologna to Ferrara.

Adding a time trial to a stage race improves both the drama of the race and its fairness. It makes a race richer and enjoyably more complicated. A rider alone on the road with only his thoughts and grim determination to ride at his maximum remains a fascinating and compelling story. The placement of a time trial in a stage race complicates a racer's tactical plans. If the race designer has done his job well, for example, a time trial can force a rider to choose between going all-out in a crucial stage that comes before a time trial and then racing the individual event tired, potentially costing him time. He might choose instead another tactic and dose his efforts during the preceding road stage while hoping to make up lost time, if any, when he rides later against the clock.
Until 1933 a rider’s fortunes in the Giro d’Italia largely rested upon his ability to climb. Climbing measures a rider’s strength to weight ratio, or relative horsepower. Smaller, lighter riders have the edge in the mountains. Witness Spanish climbing ace Vicente Trueba, whose nickname “The Flea of Torrelavega” should tell all about his size. Time trialing measures absolute horsepower, so a bigger man who can put out more pure power generally has an advantage there. Rarely do riders have so much ability that they can climb like angels and time trial like steam engines. Alfredo Binda was one such rider. Binda’s exceptional gifts aside, adding a time trial gave the Giro balance and let the bigger rouleurs have a shot at victory. Today, the time trial is often what tips the balance of victory toward a particular rider. For once in its early history, the Giro got the jump on the Tour. The Tour de France, which had used team time trials extensively, didn’t add an individual time trial stage until 1934.

A final change to give the Giro more of its modern color was to add a publicity caravan. Desgrange started it in 1930 when he became completely fed up with trade teams. He felt they corrupted his race by making deals and alliances to allow less worthy (in his opinion) riders win his race. His solution was to create a national team format in which the riders raced for national or regional teams. Until then the team’s year-round trade sponsors had paid the riders’ substantial expenses during the Tour. Since the sponsors saw the race now as a three-week publicity blackout, they could hardly be expected to pay their riders’ way. To defray the expense of supporting the riders during the Tour, Desgrange invented the publicity caravan in which firms paid the Tour organization to allow vehicles covered with advertising to follow the race route. Seeing the money sitting on the table the Giro organizers added their own caravan without having to cover the riders’ costs. The Tour later discontinued the national teams but kept the caravan. For both races this long train of logo’d cars, trucks and other contraptions, tossing souvenirs and samples to the crowds of spectators lining the route, is one of the major attractions for the race fans.

Over time, Desgrange’s switch to the national team format had the effect of widening the gap between the way the Tour and the Giro were raced. There weren’t enough cycling countries to make a peloton. Putting nine men each on Italian, French, Belgian, Swiss and German teams makes for a small pack. Desgrange filled in the needed balance with touristes-routiers (independents). Upon dispensing with independent riders in the late 1930s the Tour came up with ad-hoc French regional teams such as France-Ouest, or Nord Est-Ile de France or secondary national teams like Belgium-B.

Historian Benjo Maso explained that the smaller teams assembled without the powerful stars “gave the Tour a separate character. Almost every day a battle broke out right after the start and because none of the ‘A’ teams was in condition or prepared to control the race properly, anarchy broke out in which attacks came one after another at high speed. That was a fundamental difference with the Giro. That was run with trade teams in which the leaders exercised strict discipline. Attacks could only be made when the team leader or manager said so. And when a breakaway got clear the riders rarely worked together well. There were almost always riders in the group who’d been ordered to save themselves or not take part. The result was that barely anything happened in most stages of the Tour of Italy and the only full-out racing was in the three or four mountain stages.”

While the reader who has followed our story can see that Mr. Maso was engaging in a bit of hyperbole regarding the flatter Giro stages, there is a basic truth in what he wrote. The powerful teams and their leaders exerted an autocratic control on how the Giro stages developed and Italians who raced in the Tour often had trouble handling its more unstructured racing. On the other hand, as we have seen, transalpine riders were often unable to adapt to the Italian style.

The rivalry between Binda and Guerra heated up on the very first stage. With around fifteen kilometers to go before the finish, Binda and the others stopped to flip their rear wheels for the final climb. Pavesi told Guerra not to stop but to attack the field with the gear he had while the others were off their bikes. Bam! Guerra was gone and, along with Alfredo Bovet, beat Binda and most of the others by two minutes. Guerra hadn’t disappointed the prognosticators by taking the lead at the first opportunity.

Three days later in stage two it was Binda’s turn. He rolled into Genoa alone, 25 seconds in front of second-place Demuysère and over six minutes ahead of Guerra. It turned out that near Genoa on the Passo della Scoffera, Guerra got the hunger-knock. Cougnet, desperate to have the developing duel between Binda and Guerra continue, secretly passed the starving rider a pack of cookies. Guerra devoured them, they say wrapper and all. Personally, I’ve got a little trouble with the eating the wrapper bit.

Binda was furious when he learned of Cougnet’s illicit aid but found comfort in the fact that he was now the proud owner of the maglia rosa.

Guerra won the third and fifth stages as well. In that fifth stage he managed to elude Binda, who came in 3 minutes 21 seconds later. Guerra had dragged himself up to second place. But Demuysère, Bovet and Piemontesi had been in Guerra’s break and the Belgian was the real recipient of Guerra’s success. The overall standings now looked like this:
1. Joseph Demuysère
2. Learco Guerra @ 1 minute 16 seconds
3. Domenico Piemontesi @ same time
4. Alfredo Binda @ 1 minute 31 seconds
5. Alfredo Bovet @ 5 minutes 24 seconds

Learco Guerra wins stage 5 in Grosseto.

The next day, stage six finished at the Villa Glori in Rome. Binda and Guerra raced for the line together on the hedge-lined track. Guerra took the outside line and crashed. He argued that Binda had thrown an elbow in the sprint and caused his fall. The race jury said that Guerra had struck a branch of the hedge which stuck out onto the track and that had caused him to lose his balance. Guerra was hurt too badly to continue and was forced to retire despite being in second place, less than two minutes from the overall lead. Furious over what they thought was an unfair decision, Guerra’s entire Maino squad quit as well. Demuysère remained the race leader with Piemontesi second and Binda third.
The race was now in Naples, the farthest south the 1933 Giro would travel. From there it headed east over the hills to Foggia, then turned north up the Adriatic coast. Binda won the eighth, ninth and tenth stages, taking over the lead with the Belgian Demuysère now over four minutes back.

It should be noted that even here in the mid-1930s, the roads that the riders raced over were still often execrable. At one point the riders came to a fallen bridge with no choice but to ford the river with their bikes on their shoulders.
That first individual time trial held at Bologna was labeled the “stage of unknowns” because of the format’s newness and uncertainty over its outcome. The riders were sent off at three-minute intervals, the organizers hoping there would be enough distance between the riders to keep them from drafting each other.

Binda won the stage, which undoubtedly would have favored the now-retired Guerra. He took 1 hour 34 minutes 51 seconds to travel the 62 kilometers to Ferrara, averaging a scintillating 39.219 kilometers per hour. Demuysère was second at 62 seconds.

From Ferrara to all the way to Milan, Binda carefully extended his lead, including the terrible penultimate stage, from Bassano to Bolzano, where La Gazzetta said the weather was a witch’s brew of cold, wind and rain. Binda capped his triumphal 1933 Giro by winning the final stage to Milan. This was Binda’s fifth Giro victory, which remains the record to this day. Others have matched it but none have exceeded it. He rode thirteen stages of the 1933 Giro in pink.

I think this is the last lap of the final stage track finish.

At the finish Demuysère swore he’d never come back to race the Giro. But the man they sometimes call the Old Lion of Flanders soon relented and came back to race the Giro again in 1934 and 1935.

Climbers’ Competition:
1. Alfredo Binda. He was first to the top of all 4 peaks in the GPM.
2. Alfredo Bovet
3. Remo Bertoni

René Vietto, who spent more time in the Yellow Jersey than any rider who did not win the Tour de France, ended up twenty-second, almost an hour behind Binda.

Guerra placed second in the Tour that July, riding against a French team comsidered by Tour historian Jean-Paul Ollivier to be the finest-ever assembly of pre-war riders.

Unlike the Tour, the Giro allowed the riders to use derailleurs, which they did in 1933, at least in the mountains. The one picture I have of a 1933 mountain stage shows Guerra leading Binda while using the Vittoria system made by the Nieddù brothers, Tommaso and Amadeo. Binda had already used their Vittoria changer when he won the World Championship in Rome in the fall of 1932 and his success resulted in many pros mounting the system on their bikes for the 1933 season.

At this time it would mean a rider probably had three sprockets in the back and one up front. Riding below the chainstay was a pulley wheel which acted as a chain tensioner. Early versions (as in the picture) required the rider to reduce the chain tension, then pedal backwards while his gloved hand moved the chain to the desired sprocket. Later systems, called the Vittoria Margherita (1935 and on) had a rod-controlled pusher on the chainstay that would move the chain while the rider backpedaled. It was clumsy, but it beat getting off the bike and removing, flipping and finally reinstalling the rear wheel. Gearing expert Frank Berto noted that the Vittoria derailleur systems were rugged, simple and reliable with the tension wheel riding high enough to give good ground clearance, an important consideration in an era of bad roads. Unlike the some of the more fragile gear changing systems on the market at the time, the Vittoria still worked even when fouled with mud.